Online services with a strong social component have grown exponentially in the last several years. Sites such as MySpace and Facebook have garnered tens of millions of users. Many online services include user profiles, in which various information relating to a user can be displayed, such as friends, music, videos, comments, etc.
Many sites allow a user a degree of control over such data, such as selecting how to order friends, or what music or video is played when a profile page is viewed. Some sites also provide for community modifications to a particular constrained portion of a page, such as an area to leave comments about or endorsements of the user. However, current online services do not allow for community editing of profile data relating to the user associated with the profile, such as the ordering of friends, “what I like,” favorite bands, interests, physical appearance, characteristic music, videos, etc.
Community-edited content sites such as Wikipedia and other wikis offer members of a community the ability to alter content relating to a wide variety of topics. However, such community editing is generally applied toward knowledge management and does not apply to user-related data such as profile data.
Unfettered modifications by a community of user-related data could lead to problems such as digital vandalism or inappropriate content. Community-edited sites have suffered widely from such problems and have instituted various reputation systems, with mixed results. In the case of user-related data, there is an opportunity to avoid such problems by allowing modification of such data only by those users who have demonstrated themselves to be positive participants in the community based on their previous activities, by allowing a user control over the availability and extent of such editing, and by using friend relationships and other data to ascertain permission. However, current online services do not provide this control for user-related data.
Accordingly, it would be useful to enable community-based editing of user-related data, and it would be further useful to predicate the availability and/or extent of such editing on the prior actions of would-be editors.